‘C’est grave’: Raw, cannibalism and the racializing logic of white feminism

Abstract

This article addresses the racializing logic of white feminism and its alignment with white heteronormative registers of human life. It does so by considering Julia Ducournau’s (2017) film Raw in relation to cannibalism’s intersections of gender, sexuality and race. The film invokes feminist pleasures, centring on female desire and pitting Justine’s compulsive appetites against an inflexible social hierarchy of gender and species. However, its articulation of cannibal consumption and female subjectivity is dangerously ambivalent. By focusing on the colonial history and racializing logic of the cannibal, this article reads Raw as symptomatic of the subjective formations and social violence of white feminism. Raw portrays cannibalism as a feminist practice of posthuman resistance, but its seductive appeal also produces a troubling ambivalence around non-white and queer bodies, which resonates with black critiques of posthumanism’s reproduction of whiteness. The film invites us to inhabit our raw desires as a monstrous resistance, but what genres of human and nonhuman haunt this politics of monstrosity?